kirukkal.com

June 1, 2026

Never Mind, I Changed It

In the mid-nineties I had a college course on macroeconomics that required me to read a small book of about two hundred and thirty pages, a task I dispatched with the enthusiasm that’s reserved only for useful things like cleaning behind a fridge. What I did instead, with what now strikes me as faintly ridiculous devotion, was take the bus to the British Council Library on Mount Road in Chennai and read. There were no fans. It was quiet, and there was air conditioning, which in the Chennai of those years was unusual enough to feel slightly miraculous. The reason was not the macroeconomics. The reason was that I had been watching, on television in those years, a particular kind of Delhi economist, men in slightly rumpled kurtas and Kolhapuri sandals, sitting on panels, holding forth on subjects I did not understand in a way that made me feel I should. I had developed the conviction, with no evidence whatsoever, that if I went to the right library and read the right books I would, by some mild contagion, become that kind of person.

What I actually went there to read was a mixture of Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, and the British and American newspapers, where, in those years, a certain extremely public American affair was unfolding day by day in a way that made the broadsheets considerably more interesting than they otherwise might have been. I was, in short, going to the British Council to read tabloids and feel intellectual about it. But the Council was, as these places are, quietly disciplined about its shelves, and at some point in those afternoons I bumped into JM Keynes, more or less by accident. I was not looking for him. He was simply there, in the section one passed through to get to the periodicals, and after a while one stopped passing through and started sitting down. I bring this up because Keynes, more than almost anyone I have read since, gave me permission to change my mind, and I have been generously, perhaps excessively, exercising that permission ever since.

There is a famous line attributed to him, which goes: “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” It is one of the great lines of twentieth-century thought, often quoted by people who would like to seem reasonable, and I am sorry to report that there is no especially good evidence he ever said it. Historians have looked. The earliest reliable appearances are years after his death. He may have said something close to it. He may have said it to someone who paraphrased it later. He probably did say something in that spirit, because his career is one long, public demonstration of saying it. But the specific sentence we love so much is, in all likelihood, a sentence we wrote for him. I find this perfect. A line about changing one’s mind, which we have collectively misremembered, and yet which is so deeply true about Keynes that we have decided, on the merits, to keep using it. The man revised his economics, his politics, his views on currency, his views on Germany, his views on the future of capitalism, sometimes within the span of a single decade, and we have built a folk quote for him about doing exactly that. The quote is wrong and the spirit is right, which is itself, I would like to suggest, a small case study in how minds work.

I change my mind constantly. In the way of a person who watches a movie trailer for eight seconds and announces that the film will be unwatchable, and then, two weeks later, watches the actual film and is in tears by the second act and does not, in any meaningful sense, remember that I had originally written it off. Last month, by my count, I changed my mind about a much-praised second novel whose author I am going to decline to identify (more on this in a moment, because it’s slightly painful), a restaurant (I had decided in advance the menu was trying too hard; the food was wonderful), a haircut I was on the verge of getting (saved by a single honest friend), and a man I met at a thing, about whom I will not say more, except that my opening assessment was extremely confident and almost entirely incorrect.

The author I mentioned above is worth a sentence. My wife, who is a more patient and disciplined reader than I am, said the second novel of the author was disorienting in a way she found genuinely sad. She had wanted to like it. She had set aside the time. She had read it patiently in two languages, and at the end of all that patience reported, with what struck me even at the time as remarkable fairness, that she had simply not been able to enjoy it. I declared, with the unearned confidence of someone who had not yet opened the second one, that my wife was wrong, that I would love it, and that the matter was settled. I would like to be honest about how this turned out. The prose, in the parts I read, is still extraordinary. It has all of the author’s typical sensitivity, that quality of the author’s sentences have of attending to the small thing in the room you would not have thought to notice. The character at the centre of much of the early book is one of the more interesting people I have met in fiction in some time. I wanted to keep going. I tried, several times, to keep going. I gave up somewhere after chapter eight, defeated less by the writing than by a timeline that kept disorienting me in a way I no longer had the patience to fight.

I have kind of told my wife this, although “told” implies she did not already know. She knew. She has known since roughly the day I started arguing. Most of my mind-changes happen in the privacy of my own head, and this one has only partly made it out: I have admitted, in a low voice, on a good day, that she may have had a point, which is a very different thing from admitting she was right, and which she received with the patience of someone who had filed the matter under “resolved” long before I did. What I am not yet ready to do is the full version, the one where I walk into the kitchen and say that she was right and I was wrong and that I should not have argued with her about it for as long as I did. I am, in other words, doing exactly the thing this essay is about: I have updated, and I am refusing to ratify the update entirely, mostly to deny the other party the small satisfaction of being right out loud. A satisfaction she is, I suspect, enjoying anyway, quietly, without my cooperation. I should also say, for the record, that I intend to try the book again at some point, partly because the author deserves it, and partly because if I can talk myself back into the second book I will not, technically, owe an apology at all.

This is the rate at which my opinions about the world are quietly being updated, almost always without ceremony. This is what every adult is doing all day and most of us have simply stopped tracking the score.

You sit down to dinner with someone. By minute four you have made several decisions about her: what she does, what she’s like, whether you’ll want to see her again. By dessert most of those decisions have been quietly revised. You don’t notice. The revised version replaces the original cleanly, like one save file overwriting another, and if anyone asked you the next day what you thought of her, you would describe the dessert version as if it had been your view from the start. “Oh, I liked her immediately,” you’ll say. You did not. At minute four you were planning your exit. We do this all day. We do this with movies and books and people and ideas and recipes and weather forecasts.

The mind is a revision engine. It updates almost continuously and then, with what I can only describe as a small narrative kindness toward itself, edits the history so it looks like it always knew.

I used to tell a friend, with what I felt was a certain amount of philosophical poise, that I changed my mind whenever I got new information. This sounded, when I said it, like a principle. It sounded like the kind of thing Keynes would have said, if Keynes had said it. I felt, in those moments, like a serious person. The honest version, which I have grown into slowly, is that I update for many reasons that are not new information. I update when I am tired. I update when someone I respect raises an eyebrow. I update because a sentence sounded better the second time I read it, in a different mood, on a different day. The principle was real, in the sense that I do try to follow it. The principle was also a flattering label I had attached to a process that was running on its own with or without my permission. I think this is true of most of what we call our intellectual virtues. We have a personality, and we have a vocabulary that dignifies the personality, and the relationship between the two is closer than we like to admit.

Here is the part that took me embarrassingly long to notice. I do this all day, in private, with no anxiety whatsoever. Books, films, people, opinions about every subject from sourdough to monetary policy, constantly being revised, constantly being overwritten, the whole apparatus humming along in a state of cheerful low-grade inconsistency. But when someone else changes their mind in a way I can see (visibly and publicly, on something that matters), a small, slightly suspicious feeling appears in me, completely unbidden, that I would not endorse if I caught myself in it. “What changed?” I find myself wondering. “Was the original view wrong, or is this one wrong? Can he be trusted? Is this a real conviction or is he just being weak?”

I am, in those moments, holding another person to a standard of consistency that I do not, for one second, hold myself to. I revise my views about a film between the trailer and the credits, but I want my friends to have arrived at their politics in 1997 and held there, like a statue in a park. This is not, I think, a personal flaw. We all do this to each other. The world rewards consistency in other people and flexibility in ourselves, and almost no one is uncomfortable enough with this arrangement to mention it at parties.

I changed my mind about something recently. The specific something doesn’t matter for the purposes of this essay, and frankly I think the essay is better if I don’t say. What matters is that this was not one of my private revisions: neither the trailer nor the novel. This was a change of mind that other people could see. And the people around me noticed. They noticed it with a particular quality of attention I had not had directed at me in a while, which carried, underneath its politeness, a small and unmistakable request for an update on what happened. What had changed. Why now. Was I sure.

What was interesting, and slightly funny once I noticed it, was that I had been changing my mind about smaller things all that week, and no one had asked me to account for any of them. I had been wrong about a podcast on a morning and corrected it by the evening, and the world had not paused to inquire. I had been certain, on Monday, that I would dislike a book that I now consider a small treasure, and the universe had absorbed this update without a flicker. The size of the audience was the only thing that made this one different. The mechanism inside my head was the same.

It took me some time to understand why visible mind-changes carry a charge that private ones don’t, and the answer, when it arrived, was slightly humbling. Other people, more than we admit, more than they themselves like to admit, carry a small clay model of us around inside their heads. A version. A figurine. They built it from the evidence we carelessly left lying about, and having built it they use it: to plan, to predict, to relax in your presence, to know what to raise at a meeting and what to leave decently buried. The model is not a courtesy they extend to you. It is a piece of working equipment they use to get through their week.

When you change your mind in a way that is visible, you are not just updating your view. You are reaching into their heads and forcing them to re-sculpt the figurine. And re-sculpting people is real work. It is uncomfortable, and slightly exhausting, and we resent the work without quite knowing we resent it. We then, often, mistake the resentment for a moral judgment about the person who made us do it. He’s inconsistent. She doesn’t know her own mind. They’ve gone soft. They’ve gone hard. They’ve changed.

The accusation feels like it’s about them. It’s mostly about us. We are being asked to do a piece of mental labor we hadn’t budgeted for, and we don’t like it, and we look for someone to blame, and the person who just changed their mind is conveniently to hand. This is, I should say, not a complaint. I do this to other people too. The point is that knowing it doesn’t quite stop it. The reflex is older than the reasoning.

While we are being honest, I should mention the inverse, which is, if anything, less flattering to me. When someone changes their mind toward a position I already held, I do not, as I would like to claim, magnanimously welcome them into the fold. I experience, instead, a small, slightly indecent flicker of triumph. Finally. I was there first. Took you long enough. The flicker arrives before I have time to dress it up in better clothing, and it has nothing to do with the merits of the new position. It has to do with the fact that, for one small moment, I get to feel as if I have been quietly correct all along, and the arriving party is, by their arrival, conceding it.

This happens, I am embarrassed to report, on subjects of approximately no consequence. A friend who used to dismiss a particular sourdough restaurant in Woodinville finally goes, and finally agrees that the sourdough is, in fact, very good. A relative who spent a decade resisting a piece of music I had been playing in his presence the entire time wanders, late in life, into the fan club. These are people updating their views on bread and songs, which is a thing humans do roughly every fourteen minutes. And yet I notice, when it happens, a small private accounting taking place inside me, in which I add a point to my column, and they lose one from theirs, and the universe is briefly more correctly arranged than it was an hour ago.

I do not say this aloud. I have just enough sense not to. But I have, on more than one occasion, allowed myself a small mm of acknowledgment that meant, transparently, yes, I’ve known this for some time. Here is what sits less comfortably the longer I look at it. When other people do this to me, I find it intolerable. The mm. The look. The quiet yes, well. I find it patronizing. I find it slightly ungenerous. I find it beneath them, frankly.

I am, of course, doing exactly the same thing, in private, on every subject available to me. The mechanism is identical. Only the direction is reversed. What I want, I think, is for other people to update toward me silently, and to update toward them with a small but visible victory lap. This is not a defensible position. But it is, if I am being honest about it, the actual one.

Back to Keynes. He spent his career being publicly wrong about things and then publicly less wrong about them, often within a span short enough that his enemies could keep the receipts. He revised his position on the gold standard. He revised his position on Versailles, sort of. He revised his views on consumption, on saving, on the proper role of the state, on the long run versus the short run, all of it, in the open, in essays and letters and books that often disagreed with his own previous essays and letters and books. People held this against him at the time. Of course they did. He was making them redraw him constantly, and economists, like everyone else, would prefer not to keep an eraser handy. The accusation of inconsistency followed him around for decades.

But here is the thing about Keynes that I find I keep coming back to, in the years since I stopped taking the bus to libraries to read him. He was right more often than the people who weren’t changing their minds. Just, on the whole, more often, on the questions that mattered, in the long run that he famously remarked we were all dead in. The people who didn’t update were not, it turned out, more rigorous than him. They were just less embarrassed.

I think this is the part we don’t quite want to admit when we punish other people for changing their minds. The person who has held the same view for thirty years is not, by virtue of the holding, a more serious thinker than the person who has revised three times. They are sometimes more serious. They are sometimes just stuck. The difference between conviction and inertia is genuinely hard to tell from the outside, and we tend to award conviction generously, mostly because it asks less of us. We have built our social life, mostly without noticing, around the assumption that people don’t move much, and we punish movement accordingly, not because movement is wrong but because the alternative would mean redrawing each other everyday, and almost no one has that kind of time.

I am not going to stop changing my mind, partly because I don’t know how, and partly because I am no longer sure I should want to. I will keep being wrong about books from their first chapters, and sometimes also from their second ones, and occasionally from their authors’ previous, much-loved books. I will keep being wrong about people at minute four and revising by dessert. I will keep, occasionally, changing my mind about something larger, in a way that other people can see, and I will keep noticing the small disturbance this causes, and I will try, with what patience I can manage, not to mistake their discomfort for evidence that I have done something wrong.

The people who notice are not wrong to notice. They are doing, on me, the same work I do on myself constantly, in private, with no audience: updating a model in light of new behavior. They are mostly being asked to do it on a deadline, and without being warned, and that is an actual cost, and I would like to pay it gracefully when I can.

But I’m not going to apologize for the updating itself. The updating is what minds do. The updating is, possibly, the most interesting thing minds do. I used to think that consistency was a virtue. I have, predictably, changed my mind about that.
May 23, 2026

Shumatsu Papa

I went for a walk last Sunday afternoon and witnessed a man in a driveway trying to summon his Hyundai Ioniq out of his garage with an app. His wife and son were on the lawn, hugging each other and laughing at him with the specific giddy energy reserved for moments when a piece of expensive technology is making a husband look foolish in front of his family. The car was backing out about half as fast as a normal car would back out, and about a quarter as fast as it would have if the man had been inside it driving it like a normal person, which is to say it was backing out at the speed of a vehicle that had agreed in principle but was reserving the right to renegotiate. The man checked his phone, then the car, then his wife, then the phone. The wife kept laughing. The kid kept watching. I have no idea whether that boy will remember any of this when he is forty. I will tell you which version of his father he will remember, though. He will remember this one. The Sunday one. The one in the driveway, looking faintly ridiculous, being laughed at by his wife. The weekday version doesn’t make it to forty. Most things don’t.

I know this because I read the New York Times Sunday Routine column compulsively and have for years, and I only recently figured out why. Let me explain the column, if you don’t know it. Every Sunday, the Times profiles some notable person, an actress, a novelist, a chef, occasionally a hedge fund manager whose Sunday begins at four in the morning and is therefore not a Sunday but a Monday other people haven’t gotten to yet, and the column tells you exactly what they do with their day off. What time they get up. What they eat. Whether they go to the farmer’s market. They go to the farmer’s market. Whether they read three newspapers. They read three newspapers. Whether they cook on their day off if their job is cooking, which several of them do, and which I think is its own essay for another day.

I don’t really want to know about these people. I have never been to a farmer’s market with the kind of intentionality the Times column describes. I do not know what it would feel like to have a routine, in the sense the column means it, which is the sense of doing something on Sundays you actually want to do as opposed to doing something on Sundays because the laundry has reached a state of constitutional crisis. And yet I read it. I read it the way some people watch British baking shows, the way some people scroll Zillow listings of houses in towns they will never move to. There was something I was looking for and I could not name it, and then a few months ago at a Trader Joe’s I caught myself doing the same thing in the dairy aisle, and the thing had a shape. It was the hand-holding.

Couples in grocery stores on Sundays do this thing. One of them reaches for the milk. The other one is holding their hand. Not in a romantic way, in a I’m-here way, in the way you hold a hand you have been holding for fifteen years and have stopped thinking about. They are moving slowly. They are obstructing the aisle. The same two people on a Wednesday would have moved through that aisle like they were being timed by a fitness app. On Sunday the milk can wait. The aisle can wait. They have, briefly, no business being efficient. Once I noticed this I started seeing it everywhere. A father in Volunteer Park pushing his daughter on a swing as though the swing were a religious observance. The same man on Monday at the espresso bar in his office building would not be making eye contact with his own barista. A guy I saw on a bench in Paris once, in the Marais, reading a newspaper at noon with the particular Parisian conviction that what he was doing was not idleness but a small civic duty. A Tokyo father in Yoyogi Park with a stroller and a tiny dog, looking like he had never seen a meeting, like meetings had been invented for someone else, and I happen to know, because I had been in Tokyo earlier that week, that this man’s commuter-train face on Tuesday morning had been carved out of granite. The Yoyogi face was something else. Softer, maybe. Less defended. I had never seen it on the man and still felt like I knew it already.

Sundays don’t slow people down. That’s what I thought at first, and I was wrong, in the way you are wrong about something when you have the right data and the wrong theory. Cities are quieter on Sundays. Traffic does thin. None of that explains the swing. Here is what is actually happening. The man on the swing is not a slower version of the man at the espresso bar. He is a different man. He lives in the same body and gets out on a different schedule. The body is one body, but the man at the espresso bar and the man at the swing are not exactly the same person, and the kid in the swing is one of approximately four people on earth who has met both of them.

The Japanese have a clinical phrase for this. Shumatsu papa. My father told me about it, sometime in the late eighties, from behind The Hindu Newspaper on a Sunday afternoon. He had read a piece about Japanese salarymen, the hours they worked, the trains they slept on, the children who saw them only on Sundays, and he relayed it to me with the slightly amused detachment of a man describing an exotic foreign practice. They have a name for it, he said. Shumatsu papa. He thought the Japanese had it worse. He was, on the evidence, mostly right; Japanese hours were longer, the trains were sadder, the absence was more fundamental. He was also, on the evidence, one of millions of Indian fathers doing essentially the same job in a different climate, and he had located himself on the comfortable end of the comparison the way most of us locate ourselves on the comfortable end of any comparison that involves the word worse. There were also, to be fair to him, no obvious alternatives. He went back to his newspaper. He never mentioned it again. We had this in Madras. We just did not have a phrase for it. We had Sunday.

Our flat was five hundred square feet. Possibly four-eighty, depending on whether you counted the small verandah where the laundry lived a more interesting life than most of us. Four of us in there. Me, my sister, my mother, and a father who worked six full days a week at a job that exhausted him in ways that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to understand and now have too much of it. The Sunday nap was, in our house, a constitutional requirement. After lunch. Sunday lunch was longer than weekday lunch, by maybe twenty minutes, which doesn’t sound like a lot but in a five-hundred-square-foot flat with a single ceiling fan in 1989 was the difference between a meal and a small event. My father would roll out the pai on the floor of the front room and we would all lie down. All four of us. On a single woven mat. With the doors closed and the fan mostly just moving hot air around.

My father always woke up first. I don’t know why. I have a theory now, which is that he had figured out, somewhere in his thirties, that the nap was not actually rest. The nap was the door to Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoon was the thing he had been working six days to reach. The longer he stayed asleep, the less of it he got. So he woke up at three, or sometimes two-forty-five, and he would shake me, very gently, without waking my mother or my sister, because what he had in mind required exactly one foot soldier and not three. The errand was tea powder. There was a shop a hundred feet from our front door. Less, maybe. I could throw a cricket ball and hit it, badly. This shop, like every shop in Purasawalkam in 1989, sold tea powder by the sachet, hung on a string from the ceiling like a small garland of laundry. You did not buy a tin. Buying a tin would have been an admission that you had planned to drink tea, and tea was not planned. Coffee was the lifeline. Tea was Sunday afternoon and my father had woken up wanting it. So you bought one sachet. One sachet was enough for the family. I would run, with two rupees in my hand, possibly less, and come back with the sachet warm from being clutched. My father would already have the milk on the stove. He had not lit it yet, because he was waiting for the sachet, but the milk was on it, the way a sprinter is on the blocks.

The chai he made was Bombay chai. He had spent three years in his twenties working for a firm in Bombay that, my mother once told me, had treated him not so well, although she did not specify how. From this period of his life, he retained two things: a low-grade suspicion of all landlords, which was unjust but which I have not had the heart to relitigate, and a recipe for chai that involved a quantity of cardamom that would have alarmed a normal household. He used a lot of cardamom. He used so much cardamom that I genuinely believed, until I was twenty, that all Bombay tea contained that much cardamom, and the first time I drank Bombay tea elsewhere I assumed it was broken. He added the sugar last. He never explained this. There was also a clove in there sometimes, allegedly, but I have no memory of the clove, because the cardamom had eaten it. The dominant edition eats the minor ones. Memory is unfair to small spices.

Then he would wake my mother and my sister with the chai, and he would go and read The Hindu. He read The Hindu the way men of his generation read newspapers, which is to say he opened it fully, with a wingspan of nearly five feet, and disappeared behind it for forty-five minutes. You could leave the room. You could come back. The newspaper would still be there, with two hands sticking out of the sides, and one foot, occasionally, doing a slow tap to a song he had just put on. The editorial section used to slide out onto the floor because he never folded the paper properly again after opening it the first time. My mother complained about this constantly. I think she was right. The paper occupied most of the room when fully expanded. Around four the music started. He had a Philips tape deck, and eventually a CD player that he never trusted, in the way certain people of his generation never quite trusted CDs to do what they had promised. On Sundays the same names came out, every Sunday for thirty years. S D Burman. Kishore. SPB. Asha. Some Lata although I am no longer entirely sure how much Lata; I may have added her in retrospect, because she belongs there. Some Tamil playback if he was in a particular mood. I made a playlist after he died. It is almost exactly the playlist of those Sunday afternoons in 1989. I have not added a song to it. I do not think I ever will.

lazylens.com

At four-thirty, give or take, he would announce that anyone who wanted to go to Sandhya Restaurant could come. My mother almost always declined, with the small pleasure of a woman who has been managing a government job and household for six days and was not going to spend her Sunday afternoon evaluating someone else’s chaat. My sister and I went every time. He would walk us, the quarter mile down Purasawalkam High Road, past the temple, past the bus stand, past a tailor’s shop with a mannequin in the window that had been wearing the same shirt since 1985, possibly 1987, the years have started to compress, and we would arrive at Sandhya Restaurant, which served North Indian food at a level of authenticity that absolutely nobody in Purasawalkam was qualified to evaluate but which we patronized with the loyalty of regulars who had decided not to know. The Sandhya tea was made in a brass vessel the size of a small bathtub. It boiled all afternoon, the way the chai at certain Indian establishments does, which is to say it had been boiling since approximately 1973 and was, by physics if not chemistry, a different substance than the tea anyone had made that morning. It was thicker than my father’s. Sweeter. Slightly oilier. My father would have a cup. Sometimes two. He would let me have one, which my mother had explicitly forbidden and which both of us understood would not be discussed when we got home. My sister usually had Chola Batura and Limca. The pav bhaji at Sandhya came on a steel plate with a small mound of chopped raw onion and a wedge of lime, and there was a slick of butter on top of the bhaji that you were supposed to stir in but never did. You scooped around it. You preserved it. You ate it last. I still do this, in my forties, in restaurants that have never heard of Purasawalkam.

He worked six days a week. Full days. I am going to say this once and then not put any sentences around it. He left before I got up. He came home after I had stopped expecting him. From Monday to Saturday, my father was a tired man who was kind, but the kindness was rationed in the way the kindness of tired adults is rationed, by people who do not have the surplus to spend. The man who made cardamom chai on Sunday afternoon was not a tired man. He hummed. He did not hum on Mondays. I knew this without having been told. Kids know.

I should admit, before going any further, that I might be making all of this up. Not the cardamom. The cardamom I will defend in any court. Not Sandhya, not the playlist, not the garland of tea sachets, not the mannequin in the shirt since 1985 or 87. Those are facts. What I am less sure about is the man. It is entirely possible that the difference I keep wanting to describe between weekday-father and Sunday-father is a difference I have constructed in retrospect, out of the fact that I only really had access to him on Sundays, and the rest of the week he was a function and not a person, and I have spent thirty years assembling a man out of those Sunday afternoons because the alternative was admitting how little I knew the weekday version. Anyway.

I don’t actually think kids experience adults as continuous people. Adults insist they are, mostly because paperwork would become impossible otherwise. What a kid gets is the recurring edition. The Sunday father. The festival father. The man who arrives at school events looking slightly uncomfortable in trousers he does not wear at home. The funeral edition, which is the one you don’t meet until you are older and which arrives, when it arrives, as an entirely new species. Kids assemble a parent out of these editions the way a paleontologist assembles a dinosaur out of bones. You get the foot. You get a vertebra. You make a guess about the rest. You don’t know, until decades later, how much of your father you were inventing. The children of shumatsu papas everywhere have always known both versions, in every country that has ever had a six-day work week and a household to come home to, which is most of them.

This, I think, is what the Sunday Routine column is doing, and why I read it. Most profile journalism captures people in their public capacity. The novelist at her desk. The CEO at her conference table. The actress in her green room. The journalist sits with the subject for two hours during work hours and reports back on the version the world is paying to see. The Sunday Routine column is the only column in the newspaper that goes to the kitchen. It goes at seven-thirty in the morning. It catches them in sweatpants, walking the dog, making pancakes for a kid who is not actually hungry. It is, exactly, what a child does. The column is doing, with strangers, what I started doing at eleven in a five-hundred-square-foot flat on Purasawalkam High Road, which is trying to figure out who someone is when they are not being asked to be useful. The rest of the newspaper has given up on telling us. The column has not. I read it on Sundays. I have noticed this only now.

Civilization built the window through which any of this is possible, and it built it everywhere. The Christian Sunday. The Jewish Sabbath. The Friday in Cairo when the father is walking his daughter home from prayer along a street where the shops have closed for the same reason they close in Purasawalkam. The market day, the festival pause. The day moves. The window doesn’t. A Cairo father on a Friday afternoon and a Madras father on a Sunday afternoon are the same man in different weather, and a Cairo kid watching her father walk back from prayer is doing the same assembly job a Madras kid was doing on Purasawalkam High Road in 1989. Nobody designed this. It accumulated. It is one of the oldest pieces of soft infrastructure humans ever built, and we have mostly forgotten it was ever specifically anything, and you can move to a country that has never looked anything like yours and find Sunday already installed, holding the window open, doing its quiet weekly work, asking nothing of you except that you show up.

I went back to Sandhya in 2019. Purasawalkam has changed. The tailor’s shop is gone. The bus stand has moved. The temple is the same temple. The brass vessel is the same vessel, or its grandchild, you cannot tell. The pav bhaji still arrives with the slick of butter on top. It was humid enough that my glasses fogged when I walked in. I stirred the butter in this time. I am older. I cannot defend the choice.

Somewhere in the world, right now, a shumatsu papa is waking his kid from a Sunday nap. He has six other days of being someone else. There is cardamom on the counter. There is milk on the stove. In ninety minutes he will be humming a song he does not hum on Mondays, and the kid will be assembling a parent out of the afternoon without knowing it. The fathers, of course, only know one. They are inside it.

May 23, 2026

selvi akka’s tomato plant

there is a tomato plant
behind selvi akka’s building
growing out of an old blue paint bucket
split down one side
like somebody meant to throw it away
and forgot halfway through

selvi akka says she never planted it

selvi akka also says
ilaiyaraaja once ate bajji
from her cousin’s tea stall in kodambakkam
so you can believe what you want

every year
right after the first hard summer rain
that little plant climbs the back wall again

weak-looking at first
leaves hanging tired
like they got no business trying
then one hot week later
it is everywhere
twisting through the grill gate
like the whole place belongs to it

last year
a boy with a camera
stood near the drainage canal almost half an hour
taking pictures of it

selvi akka watched from upstairs
without saying a word

that was unusual

the corporation workers complain about it
kids knock the green tomatoes down with chappals
one man from the first floor
tried plucking a few once
and selvi akka came downstairs in her nightie
shouting so loud
every window opened at the same time

funny thing is
nobody there even cooks with tomatoes that much anymore

still
every summer
that plant comes back
acting like it knows something

like
it knows something
the rest of us don’t.

May 16, 2026

1.618 (Approximately)

Audrey Hepburn

Here is a secret about photographs. The most important tool in a photographer’s kit is not the camera. It is the crop. I have taken a great many photographs in my life, and I am fairly certain I have made more crops than clicks. The photograph arrives first. The decision comes later. You drag the little handles. You nudge the frame left, then up, then back. You are not thinking about mathematics. You are not thinking about ancient Greece. You are thinking, if you are thinking at all, something like “no, no, there”. And you stop. Nobody teaches you how to do this. There is no class called Introduction to Cropping for the Mildly Uncertain. You figured it out the way you figured out which side of the pillow is the cool side: through a private, inarticulate conviction you would struggle to defend under oath. You can spend forty-five minutes in a toothpaste aisle, paralyzed by the difference between “whitening” and “advanced whitening,” which, as far as anyone can tell, is the word advanced. But a photograph you fix in four seconds with a breezy confidence.

Golden ratio (or whatever)

There is a name for what you just did. Or rather, there is a name for the neighborhood of instinct you wandered into. It carries the faint, reassuring whiff of ancient Greek authority, which is the best kind of authority, because the people who held it are all dead and cannot appear on a podcast to correct you. It is called the golden ratio. The golden ratio is approximately 1.618. It is represented by the Greek letter phi (φ), because mathematicians enjoy naming things after symbols most people cannot type without assistance. The number comes from a relationship so simple it feels like it shouldn’t matter: the ratio of the larger part to the smaller is the same as the ratio of the whole to the larger part. If that sentence made you feel like you were being lowered into deep water, don’t worry. The number has never once required your understanding. It has been showing up uninvited for twenty-five centuries and is not about to stop now.

And it shows up everywhere. The Parthenon, we are told, was built to golden-ratio proportions. Leonardo da Vinci, a man who could not finish a painting if you held a crossbow to his head but who could start one like nobody in the history of civilization, allegedly embedded it in the Mona Lisa, in the Vitruvian Man, in what appear to be the margin doodles of a catastrophically overcommitted genius. The nautilus shell supposedly spirals in a golden curve. Sunflower seeds arrange themselves in Fibonacci sequences that converge toward phi. The proportions of Audrey Hepburn’s face, we are told, conform to the ratio, which, if true, means that mathematics itself looked at Audrey Hepburn and said, “yes, that one”. Your face, if it happens to be attractive, is said to obey the ratio. Your face, if it does not, is said to be “interestingly asymmetrical,” which is what people say when the math has gently let you down. Over the centuries, the golden ratio has accumulated a reputation that most numbers would find mortifying. It has been called the divine proportion, the secret of beauty, the mathematical signature of God. That is a lot of pressure for a number that is, at the end of the day, just sitting there being irrational. There are books about it. There are TED talks about it. There are graphic designers who will charge you eleven thousand dollars to apply it to your company logo, though what they are mostly applying is a rectangle.

The whole thing feels wonderful, for a while. Here is one number, precise and eternal, that explains why certain things look right. Why the curve of a seashell pleases you. Why that photograph, once cropped, felt suddenly correct. It suggests that beauty is not a matter of taste, not some argument you are going to lose to a friend who went to art school. It suggests that beauty is structural. The universe has preferences, and miracle of miracles, they resemble yours.

The trouble begins when someone actually checks. Take the Parthenon. It is undeniably beautiful, and it does contain rectangles, and some of those rectangles are in proportions close to the golden ratio, if you are flexible about where you start measuring and where you stop. Do you include the steps? The pediment? The parts that have not survived the last two thousand years or so? Depending on what you choose, you can find the ratio, or something near it, or something not particularly near it that you can describe as “approximately golden” if you squint and deploy the word approximately. The nautilus shell has a similar problem. Its spiral is gorgeous and logarithmic, but its actual ratio is closer to 1.33 than 1.618. Calling this the golden ratio is like calling someone six feet tall when they are five foot four. You can do it. But only if you have a very relaxed relationship with accuracy. As for da Vinci, look, he almost certainly knew about the ratio. He illustrated a whole book on it (his friend Pacioli’s book). Whether he deliberately planted it in his paintings is another matter. You can lay a golden rectangle over the Mona Lisa and it will frame her face nicely. You can also lay it over a photograph of a Taco Bell and it will frame the drive-through menu nicely. The rectangle is not a detective. It does not find beauty. It is just a shape. The finding is being done by the person holding it, who arrived with a theory and, surprise, left with confirmation. Spend any time on the internet and you will recognize the dynamic.

In 1876, a German psychologist named Gustav Fechner did something radical. He asked people a question. He showed them rectangles, tall ones, wide ones, squares, all the rectangles he could lay hands on, and asked which they found most pleasing. That was the whole study. No theory, no golden anything, no prompting. Just: which rectangle do you like? The results showed a strong preference for rectangles near the golden ratio. This was taken as proof. The ratio wasn’t just in temples and seashells. It was in us. Hard-wired. An aesthetic instinct so deep it came before language, before culture, before anyone had ever had an opinion about fonts. Except. Later studies found that the preference was fuzzier than Fechner claimed. People didn’t converge on 1.618 like homing pigeons. They converged on a range. They liked rectangles longer than a square but not absurdly so. They hated extremes. They wanted something balanced but not symmetric, alive but not chaotic, interesting but not trying too hard. They wanted, basically, the visual equivalent of the person at a dinner party that everyone is secretly hoping to be seated next to. The golden ratio lives in that zone. But it doesn’t own it. What Fechner had discovered was not that humans love a specific number. He had discovered that humans love a specific kind of balance. A balance that avoids perfection. A balance with room to breathe. The kind you recognize when you see it, in a photograph or in a face.

There is a term for this in design. It is called dynamic symmetry and it actually describes something rather profound. Static symmetry is a mirror. Left matches right. Nothing surprises you. It is bland like a passport photo or a tax form. It is satisfying the way folding laundry is satisfying, orderly and complete and nobody’s idea of a good time. Dynamic symmetry is balance through inequality. A large shape on one side answered by a small one on the other. The composition holds because the mismatches resolve.

Wes Anderson Frame

Think of a Wes Anderson frame, symmetrical, composed, almost oppressively precise. Now think of a Spielberg frame, off-centre, weighted to one side, somehow more alive for it. Both work. But only one makes you lean forward. The golden ratio is one flavor of dynamic symmetry. It is not the rule. It is a description, after the fact, of something we were already inclined to do. A mathematical Post-it stuck to an instinct that got there first.

Schindler’s List (Spielberg Frame)

I am writing this on a Saturday afternoon in May. The coffee is cold. I keep getting up to look at the bird feeder at the neighbor’s house, which a squirrel has been working on for an hour and a half now with the dogged optimism of a creature that has confused effort with progress. I mention this because I am about to make a turn in the essay, and the turn is going to feel a little abstract, and I want it on the record that I have been thinking about a squirrel.

Here is the turn. If the golden ratio were a law of beauty, a real law, the way gravity is, then beauty would be something we discover. We would find it the way we find a planet. It would be there whether we showed up or not. That is not what happens. What happens is: we see a shell, and something in us responds. We build a temple, and it stirs something we didn’t expect. We crop a photograph, and the frame clicks into place with a rightness that is almost physical. Then, only then, we go looking for the reason. We measure. We overlay spirals on the image. And when the numbers land somewhere near 1.618, we say there it is, proof that beauty is mathematical. But the feeling came first. The measurement came after. We did not discover beauty in the ratio. We discovered the ratio in things we already found beautiful. And there is a difference between those two sentences that is, depending on your patience for that kind of phrasing, either enormous or annoying. We are pattern-completing animals. We see two dots and a curved line and we see a face. We hear three notes and we finish the melody. We read half a sentence and we are already building the other half before our eyes arrive. This is what your brain does all day, at breakfast, in traffic, during meetings you are pretending to pay attention to. We take the incomplete and we make it whole, so fast and so constantly that we have mistaken this for the world being orderly when in fact it is us, frantically ordering it. Beauty, whatever beauty actually is, seems to live in the gap between the pattern and its completion. Not in the pattern. In the moment of recognition. When the crop lands or when the chord resolves. The golden ratio captures one frequency of that recognition. A proportion where the tension is just noticeable and just resolved. But the ratio is not doing the work. You are.

Something else. The ratio is not the only system that sells itself this way. We are surrounded by frameworks that arrived after the fact and now insist they came first. The bestseller list does not tell you which book is good. It tells you which book a great many people bought, which is a different question, though the list is happy to let you confuse them. The Rotten Tomatoes score does not tell you whether you will love a film. It tells you the average reaction of strangers, processed through an aggregation rule someone in an office decided was reasonable. The algorithm that decides what plays next does not know what moves you. It knows what people who resemble you have clicked on, which is not the same thing, and has never been the same thing, no matter how many times the autoplay starts before you are ready. These systems do what the golden ratio does. They take a wide, messy range of human preferences and hand it back to you as a number. They convert “you found this beautiful” into “this is, by measurement, beautiful”. And then they quietly suggest you might want to update your taste accordingly.

The trick is the same trick. The feeling came first. The measurement came after. But by the time the measurement arrives, dressed up in authority and decimal places, it begins to look like the source rather than the description. You start checking the score before you trust your own response. You wait to see what the room thinks before you decide what you think. You measure your enjoyment of a film against its Metacritic average and feel vaguely embarrassed if the numbers don’t agree. And over time, the measurement stops reflecting the preference and starts shaping it. This is the real lesson the golden ratio almost teaches us. It is that we are forever inventing systems to tell us what to feel, and then forgetting that we invented them. The ratio is harmless. Most of these systems are harmless too. But the instinct underneath, to outsource recognition to something that looks more authoritative than your own response, is worth noticing. You already know how a photograph should be cropped. You already know which sentence in a paragraph is the one that landed. You already know which song you want to hear again. The number can come later, if it comes at all. It is allowed to describe the preference. It is not allowed to replace it.

I have been doing the same thing writing this essay. A paragraph got too long and something said break. The argument drifted into abstraction and I pulled it back to a photograph, a shell, a rectangle, because the concrete thing felt right and the abstract thing was starting to feel like a lecture, and nobody wants that. I have been cropping this essay the entire time. And so have you. You skimmed where it dragged. You slowed where it surprised you. You have been composing your reading the way I have been composing my writing, and neither of us used a formula.

The golden ratio is exactly 1.6180339887498948482. It will continue forever. It will never repeat. It will never resolve. Neither will the instinct it is trying to describe.
May 9, 2026

The Jar Under the Apple Tree

The hook was at the exact height of the average adult human skull, which is the kind of thing you only notice once.

Many years ago, I worked in an office in a downtown I will not name, in a building whose interior architectural decisions had been made by people who I can only assume were no longer available for comment. The door of my office, when closed, presented a coat hook. The coat hook was positioned, through some collaboration between the original carpenter and the laws of probability, at exactly that height. The hook itself was not the problem. The hook was, by any reasonable measure, doing exactly what hooks do, which is essentially nothing. It hung there. Coats found it. Civilization proceeded. If you were grading hooks on professional conduct, this hook would have been in the upper percentile, possibly receiving a small annual bonus.

The problem was a friend of mine. He was, and remains, one of the most animated talkers I have ever known. A man who could not deliver a piece of news, however small, without committing his entire upper body to the project. He came into my office one afternoon to tell me something I no longer remember, closed the door behind him out of habit, and leaned back against it in the way he leaned back against everything, with the full and undefended weight of a man who had never in his life considered the question of what was directly behind his head.

I saw it happen before it happened. I saw the small sequence. The lean. The contact. The pause of confusion that precedes the realization. Then a level of vocalization that suggests we have departed conversation entirely and entered a different category of human experience, one that involves forms. So I cupped the back of his head with my palm, and moved him forward by a few inches, like a piece of furniture I had suddenly developed strong opinions about. He stopped mid-sentence. He looked at me. I looked at him. We agreed, without speaking, never to discuss what had just happened, and he went on telling me whatever he had been telling me, and I went on listening, or rather pretending to listen, because the part of my brain that listens had been temporarily reassigned.

The thing I want to tell you is not that I did this. The thing I want to tell you is that I did not decide to do this. It was already happening. By the time I noticed it was happening, it had happened. Some part of me had run the entire calculation. The lean, the impact, the email I would have to send afterward. And it had dispatched my hand on a small mission of pre-emptive intervention before the rest of me had finished forming an opinion about it. He continued his story. I continued my pantomime. Nothing in the conversation acknowledged that one of us had just briefly seceded from the meeting in order to avert an injury that the other one was in no danger of sustaining.

I started noticing it everywhere. A glass tips. Your hand is already there. A child stumbles. You are crouching before you remember the verb for crouching. There is a particular genre of short video that I have come to find quietly mesmerizing. A parent walking with a toddler, and at some point the toddler does something the toddler did not warn anyone about, and the parent’s hand simply arrives, palm out, between the child and a piece of furniture that was about to teach the child a lesson nobody wanted them to learn yet. The parent keeps walking, keeps talking, keeps doing whatever the parent was doing. The hand was already there. The video is six seconds long, and you can find a thousand of them.

It is, on the whole, an extraordinarily useful arrangement. If every action required formal approval from the conscious mind, most of us would spend a great deal of time watching things fall. But it does create a peculiar hierarchy. Because once a behavior has been moved into this layer, it stops negotiating with you. The hook did not care that the person standing in front of me was telling me something that was, by any reasonable measure, more important than the structural integrity of his skull. The system had already decided. It would run. And I, the official executive of my own life, had been informed only as a courtesy.

You can see versions of this elsewhere, if you start looking. A small bird, finding a predator near its nest, will perform a strangely theatrical injury, dragging one wing as though it has just remembered a previous engagement with gravity, to lure the predator away from something smaller. An animal will position itself between danger and its young with a decisiveness that suggests this is not the first time the situation has arisen, even when, in the literal sense, it is. There is a quality to these actions that is hard to miss once you have seen it. They do not look considered. They look pre-written.

⸻

In the autumn of 1942, in Warsaw, there was a woman who was about to develop a problem that did not admit of hesitation. Her name was Irena Sendler, and she was, on paper, a social worker. The paper, as it turned out, was the useful part. Her credentials gave her permission to enter the Warsaw Ghetto on the grounds of inspecting for typhus, a disease the German occupiers were terrified of and consequently reluctant to investigate too closely themselves. The ghetto at that point contained roughly four hundred thousand people pressed into an area meant for a small fraction of that number, and among those four hundred thousand were children whose situation, in the autumn of 1942, was beginning to clarify itself in a way no one wanted to look at directly.

Irena Sendler

Sendler began removing them. The methods were, by the standards of any reasonable description, improvised. Children were carried out in toolboxes, which had to be the right size and which had to contain a child who had been taught, somehow, in advance, not to make a sound. Children were carried out in sacks, in suitcases, in the false bottoms of carts. Older children were walked through sewers. Infants were sedated and placed under stretchers in ambulances, beneath the legs of adults who had been instructed to look bored. A mechanic named Antoni Dabrowski drove one of the ambulances, and his dog, who had been trained for this, would bark whenever they passed an occupier’s checkpoint, loudly enough to cover any sound a sedated infant might unexpectedly produce. The dog was, I want to note, a participant in this. The dog had a job and it did the job.

Each removal would have required a decision, if the system had been built to require decisions. The cost of being caught was not ambiguous. Sendler knew this because in October 1943 she was caught, and what happened was that the Gestapo broke both her feet and both her legs and sentenced her to be shot. She was not shot, in the end. Zegota, the underground organization she worked with, bribed a guard, who added her name to the list of executed prisoners and let her escape into a country where she would have to remain in hiding for the rest of the war.

If Sendler had been operating on a model where each child required fresh deliberation, the system would have collapsed under the accuracy of its own arithmetic. The risks were too large. The cost of being caught was too clear. Any honest internal accounting, performed in real time, in the moment, with full information, would have produced a number of children significantly closer to zero than to two and a half thousand. Two and a half thousand is the number of children Sendler and her network removed from the Warsaw Ghetto.

She wrote their names down. She wrote their real names, and the names they had been given for their new identities, and the addresses of the families and convents and orphanages where they had been placed, on small pieces of cigarette paper. She rolled the papers up. She placed them in glass jars. She buried the jars in the garden of a friend’s house at 9 Lekarska Street, beneath an apple tree, because she believed, correctly, as it turned out, that if she did not survive the war, someone would need to know who these children had been, in order to give them back to whatever was left of their families when whatever was left of their families came looking. She kept going. She kept going through 1942, through 1943, through her own arrest, through everything that should have been a stopping point and was not.

And here is the thing that I want to say carefully, because I think it is the thing that is usually missed about her, and about the very small number of people in any given catastrophe who behave the way she did.

They were not her children.

⸻

There is a temptation, when encountering a story like this, to reach for words like courage, or sacrifice, or goodness. Those words are accurate as far as they go. They are also, in a particular way, a little lazy, because they describe the behavior as if it were something chosen each time, weighed each time, decided each time, by a person standing at a moral fork in the road with the leisure to think about it. What you are actually looking at is something else. You are looking at a system that does not wait to be chosen.

The bravery is not absent. It has been moved. It happened once, somewhere earlier, in a decision that the woman walking back through the gate with an empty toolbox no longer has to make. Some commitments, made deeply enough and early enough, get moved out of the part of the mind that deliberates and into the part of the mind that simply runs. They stop being decisions. They become behaviors. And behaviors, unlike decisions, do not require the person performing them to be brave at the moment of performance. They require the person performing them to have been brave once, long ago, at the moment of installation.

This is, structurally, the same thing that was happening with the coat hook. Just so I’m clear, I am aware of the size of this comparison and I am not trying to flatten it. The hook is small. Sendler is not. But the mechanism, the thing where the body moves before the deliberating mind has been consulted, the thing where some category of event has been placed on a list of events that are not allowed to occur, is the same mechanism. The hand that moves to catch the back of a head that was not actually going to be injured is operating on the same wiring as the hand that moves to lift a child into a toolbox. The only difference is what has been pre-committed, and how deeply, and at what cost.

Most of what we admire in other people, when we look closely, turns out not to be a series of admirable choices. It turns out to be a single choice, made once, that has been moved so far upstream of the moment of action that it no longer feels like a choice at all. It feels like temperament. It feels like instinct. It feels, to the person doing it, like nothing in particular. The instinct that lifts a child who is not yours into a toolbox is not, technically speaking, an instinct. It was installed. Somebody installed it. Somebody decided, at some point, possibly without knowing they were deciding, that certain categories of event were not going to be allowed to unfold in their presence if they could help it. And then they stopped having to decide.

This is the part of the story we usually skip, because it is harder to celebrate than courage. Courage is a moment. This is an architecture. Courage gets a medal. This gets a coat hook, and a hand that moves before the rest of you has been informed.

⸻

Most of the time, nothing happens. Which is, when you think about it, the entire point. The system exists so that nothing happens. The visible outcome of a working pre-commitment is the absence of an event. No one notices it, because there is nothing to notice. The injury that didn’t occur, the child who lived, the head that didn’t meet the hook, these all share the same characteristic, which is that they do not show up in any account of the day. They show up only in the negative space, in the things that should have happened and didn’t, because somewhere upstream a decision was made once so it would not have to be made again.

We don’t decide to move. We move.